Thursday, April 28, 2011

Public Domain Resources Index Page

Note: There will be some amount of overlap and duplication between this list of links focused entirely on Public Domain Resources and the more general Links to Resources that we've arranged into alphabetical order along the left-hand sidebar of the blog. If anything, this redundancy ought to make your use of these two different resources all that much easier.

Our series: Revisiting the Public Domain will be continuing, and will have its own Index Page, once it has a few more entries.
------------------

Featured Resource:

Public Domain SherpaA very useful tool for tracking down whether something is or is not in the Public Domain, or at least it's a very good start. After this it takes professional researchers, librarians, and lawyers...and money.

---------------------

Last Updated: April 29, 2011

Archive(dot)org (The Internet Archive)
A tremendous repository of books, films, audio, and more and all of it in the Public Domain. You could spend entire weeks just mining the amazing lost treasures buried all over the various interconnected sites that make up the Archive.

Creative Commons
Everything you need to know, care to know, want to know or just might need to know all in one handy place.

Everything New is Old Again by netherwerks
We go on and on about Public Domain superheroes from the Golden Age, amongst other, related stuff.

The Free Library
Millions of articles, books and more all of it free and online and ready to go right now.

Google Books
A quick and painless way to find online references that you probably already know about, but since we dislike assuming things, we included it anyhow.

Government Comics
The University of Nebraska at Lincoln maintains a sizable collection of vintage Government Comics that has to be seen to be believed. Some of this stuff might well prove useful to writers, artists, alternative historians, DMs and other mad-folk.

Hathi Trust
An online research library that can get you results that Google Books can't and probably won't.

Photos of the Great War
Photography from World War One. Be warned: you could lose a few hours sifting through this site if the subject matter is at all of any interest to you...and they provide a nice set of links to take you farther down into the trenches...

Photo-Sleuth
A great blog devoted to scrounging about and exploring vintage photos and associated things of great interest to anyone interested in said things, like us and maybe two of you lot.

Project Gutenberg
The original and still one of the best sources for Public Domain editions of just about anything/everything that has ever been written/published. It just keeps on growing and getting better--but they need all our support to keep going. Or better yet, you could sign-on as an editor, scanner or other volunteer...and of course they always need charitable contributions...

Public Domain Superheroes
A site that went from featuring information on Public Domain Superheroes to announcing its transition to becoming a cartoon-blog focused on Public Domain Characters to silence since Jan, 2011. Maybe they're still getting ready?

The Public Domain Treasure Hunter
This lady is a hardcore Public Domain researcher and here she offers courses on how to use Public Domain Sources in your work, but we haven't taken any and probably won't as we've been mucking about in this area for a long time now. She does offer some interesting tips and other stuff at her blog/site. Just be aware of the marketing.

USGS Map It
A service of the US Geological Survey that allows you to make maps based on real-world data that they have accumulated at tax-payer expense. It'd be fiscally foolish to not use this service.

The Vintage Library
Pulps that you can read from all across the web--a great place to start if you want to find out more about the Pulps and what-all goes along with them...

Vintage Pixels
An online database of images, some of which are in the Public Domain, most are available for use, though a few might cost you some cash...

@Trey,Scottsz & Theodoric: thanks for the kind words--we've been accumulating a bunch of these sorts of resources and wanted to make them more usable and accessible. We're looking at using Delicious or one of those services to further expand the utility of this stuff...

.

This Is My Commonplace Blog

"This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily jotted down for possible future use in weird fiction. Very few are actually developed plots—for the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various—dreams, things read, casual incidents, idle conceptions, & so on."

Some Soundtrack Options

All the original text of Old School Heretic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, except where it is the contribution of a guest author and all such material is used by permission and copyrighted by those respective parties as noted in each such instance. All items from the Public Domain are clearly marked as such and obviously remain Public Domain.